Jailbreak

Cydia

Many of us are guilty of not updating our Cydia packages on a timely fashion. Whether itís because we donít know we have updates, we become busy throughout the day, or we just canít be bothered to spend our time updating our software, we just find ourselves inclined not to update everything as soon as an update is released.

A new tweak dubbed Aptdate by iOS developer thekirbylover is now available in Cydia and it will let you know when there is an update for your packages in Cydia. It will be a real life saver if you have a hard time catching up with tweak updates in Cydia.

Aptdate checks the status of CydiaUpdates.net every five hours to see if there are any updates to the packages installed on your iOS device. Unfortunately, since the tweak checks that Web site to see if there are updates available, you won't get a notification if that Web site doesn't support the repository of the tweak you need updated. That being said, the scope of Aptdate is limited, but it should pick up on most of your tweaks since CydiaUpdates covers most of the default repositories including BigBoss and ModMyi.

From the preferences pane, you will find options to configure for Aptdate. From here, you can enable and disable the tweak on demand. The option to change the time increments of when Aptdate checks for Cydia package updates is coming in a future update, however it defaults to every five hours for now. It's a considerable amount of time, but a single check every five hours should not kill your battery very effectively.

Aptdate only displays notifications with the iOS 5 banner style and the banner includes a Cydia icon with a description that reads, ďAn update for [tweak name here] is available.Ē You can then manually dismiss the banner with the round ĎXí button at the right side of the banner. The banner notification is better than an alert-style notification because it is less obtrusive and still allows you to play a game or to continue with the task at hand without having to pause and direct your attention toward the notification before you can get back to your task.

For a free tweak, Aptdate is worth taking a look at. It's very clean, simplistic, and it is a great addition to all jailbroken devices. It does require an internet connection to check for package updates. Check it out!

I installed this yesterday... I've seen similar things for being notified of app store updates but hadn't noticed one yet for Cydia notifications... Funny thing is: I usually check Cydia more than once every 5 hours... So this is cool if for some crazy reason I go more than 5 hours without firing up Cydia. Is opening Cydia a minimum of 4 times a day excessive? Probably... Do I care... No 😜